Thriving in the Vibrant, Green Universe of Starship Living

The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to support creativity in game development and to honor dedicated game creators who are advancing the medium. This year, Game Developer engaged with the finalists for the IGF’s Nuovo and Grand Prize nominees before GDC to discuss the concepts, design choices, and tools behind each submission. Game Developer and GDC operate as sibling entities under Informa.

Starship Home transforms your private residence into a spacecraft, outfitting it with peculiar technology and extraterrestrial flora. Whether you wish to understand your plants and their diverse characteristics or travel to entire worlds from your living room, this VR experience offers stunning landscapes to explore and some fascinating flora to appreciate.

Game Developer conversed with Doug North Cook, creative director of the Nuovo Award nominated game, to uncover how they conceived the idea of utilizing the player’s home within a mixed-reality environment, the design decisions that were made in thoughtfully using the participant’s home, and what captured their interest about having players interact with plants while they navigate through the cosmos.

Who are you, and what was your involvement in creating Starship Home?

I am Doug North Cook, the CEO and creative director of Creature, the studio behind Starship Home. I cannot stress enough how vital a team effort this project was with our art director Ashley Pinnick and engineering director Mark Schram co-leading development alongside a significantly larger crew. Their guidance, enthusiasm, ingenuity, and talent were what enabled our team to deliver something that, above all, felt truly unique.

What is your background in game development?

Most of my experience lies in academia. I was a design professor specializing in immersive technology, leading a department at Chatham University in Pittsburgh until my colleague Callum Underwood encouraged me to transition into VR at Robot Teddy (where we contributed to the development of The Last Clockwinder, Among Us VR, No More Rainbows, and several others). I left Robot Teddy to focus on creating Starship Home and to establish an XR-focused game brand that also released the Meta Quest Game of the Year, Maestro, and the Apple Vision Pro Game of the Year, THRASHER.

How did you conceive the idea for Starship Home?

The original concept for Starship Home was one of those magical moments where an idea lands nearly fully formed in your mind. I spent an entire day passionately jotting down notes to capture what I envisioned. The core concept revolved around the idea that if we were creating a game in mixed reality and could not control the environment the player engaged in, then we needed to embrace that context and make it an integral part of the gameplay. We decided to transform whatever room you were in into a starship and then launch that room into outer space. Your room accompanies you on this journey, becoming a character in the narrative, and the game feels distinct depending on where you are experiencing it. There’s a profound magic in that.

A few days after formulating the initial idea, my partner helped me refine that vision into a pitch deck that I quickly shared with the individuals who formed the Starship Home team—the goal being to gather those who had made significant contributions to new interaction, storytelling, and technical design for immersive projects so far, and unite them to collaborate on this project.

What development tools were used to create your game?

We developed the game in Unity specifically for the Meta Quest 3 series. This enabled us to achieve some technomagic—integrating platform-specific features to create a level of experience that is truly unprecedented.

Starship Home transforms your space into a cosmic vessel. What fascinated you about taking the player’s home and adding extraordinary elements to it? Why merge their reality with your imaginative alien technology and beings?

Throughout development, we frequently discussed the concept of Starship Home as an “assisted daydream” and that by grounding the player in their environment and subtly elevating a shared illusion, we could tap into the player’s imagination to fill in the gaps. We focused deeply on the interactivity and responsiveness of the objects we placed in your home so that they would feel like they belong alongside the physical items in your space. We always saw users moving a chair to position themselves as the captain of the ship, or taking books from a shelf to make room for one of our plants—it’s a form of imaginative play that
demands an imaginative framework. We aimed to embed in users a structure of astonishment, joy, and unease.

What obstacles arose from developing dimensions that might eventually align with the player’s real-world environment? What considerations influenced the design of various ship components, technologies, and flora in such a manner that they could seamlessly integrate with the player’s reality, especially given the diverse nature of living spaces?

This was undoubtedly one of our most significant challenges—creating a context-free game that feels relevant in any scenario. Early on, we reached a consensus within the team around several fundamental design principles that Ashley Pinnick, our art director, crystallized into conceptual sketches and design language that guided much of what the game evolved into.

These principles included ground interaction—the notion that every object should meaningfully engage with the floor, tables, shelves, and any flat surface we could define at the platform level. A notable example is the plant pots. When a player moves a pot toward the ground, legs extend from the bottom of the pot to land it securely, and we cast a shadow on that surface—but if the player lets the pot float in mid-air, it will activate little jets that keep it suspended. We strive to ensure that players can interact with items in various ways, allowing them to explore alien technology as they progress.

Initially, we had ideas to enrich the player’s environment in multiple ways with more visual overlays, but ultimately, we discovered that the most captivating aspect with the current state of technology was to include fewer items with a higher level of detail and depth. The flora are also responsive to the space, the player, and one another in ways that can be unexpected—one of the plants features a long tentacle arm that, when close to the controls, will sometimes reach out and press buttons to turn our holographic interface on and off. Some of these plants are quite mischievous.

What considerations were made in developing the various machines and ship devices so that they felt otherworldly yet conveyed their purpose through their design? How did you make the controls of a starship genuinely feel intuitive?

In the early stages, Ashley defined our organic, fluid, and gooey design language that became the foundation for everything. We wanted the ship to genuinely feel soft, dynamic, and familiar without being overt. We borrowed elements from classic sci-fi like levers, buttons, and holographic projectors, but various items like our fertilizer creatures and the device used to interact with the alien flora underwent multiple iterations to discover something innovative while remaining practical. We focused on interactions that were simple yet engaging.

What intrigued you about focusing on nurturing different plants within the game? About giving these plants distinct personalities for the player to interact with?

We were excited by the idea of creating a game that encourages players to be caretakers and plant enthusiasts—to find joy in nurturing. These are elements we aspire to see more of in the world. With a mixed reality game, users entrust us to deliver an experience within their homes. We take this unspoken intimate contract very seriously and aimed to ensure we crafted memorable, magical experiences for those spaces. I believe that Starship Home infuses a little bit of magic into every